This month, I’m with a team on an island in Indonesia.
It is one of Indonesia’s smaller islands, off the coast of North Sumatra. It is called Nias. It took us two days, 5 planes and a 3-hour bus ride to get here. We are staying at a missionary training centre located in the central part of the island. Essentially, we are in the jungle. It is very hot and humid and green and beautiful. We have no running water, and no well. We shower using rainwater. We were getting up each morning to walk into the jungle to collect the water from a little pond. At every prayer throughout each day, we asked for rain. Then, not long after we arrived, a rainstorm came and now we have about a week’s worth of water saved in a tank. And this during the country’s dry season, when months can pass without any rain. Praise God.
We are teaching English classes to the students here at the training centre and to adults from the nearby village. We have also been assisting with a health clinic and an agriculture program to teach locals how to make the soil more fertile. These are the work of a missionary couple that came to Nias when we did. The husband, from Brazil, is an agriculturalist; the wife, from Austria, is a doctor. They have been such a huge help to us in many ways, like with translation and helping us to figure out how to use our phones here. One of the beautiful things about doing missions work around the world is seeing how God will draw His people from many different places and bring them to one place to do His work.
One day, the wife was teaching on basic healthcare and hygiene to help the students create a culture of healthfulness that often doesn’t exist in a place like Nias. At the end of her teaching, she shared stories about how God uses her work in healthcare to meet spiritual needs. In one, she told of a Hindu woman here in Indonesia that she and her husband were caring for.
The woman had a massive tumor on her leg, and each day they would go to her house and tend to her.
She knew about their faith but they never discussed it. They continued to pray for her and for her healing. After many months, she wasn’t getting better, but the couple continued to go to her. The woman was moved by their kindness, at how two people who didn’t know her could love her and care for her so well when she could do nothing for them in return. She said, “If this is what your God is about, then I want to know your God.” So she gave her life to Him. The woman was never healed and she eventually died, but she died full of joy and peace knowing she was going to the One who gave her life.
The doctor told another story about a teen boy here on Nias they encountered. He had been harvesting from a rubber tree when some chemicals spilt in his right eye and blinded it. When she met him, his eye was milky white and he was ashamed and discouraged by the thought of living the rest of his life with his eye that way. She sent pictures of his eye to another doctor she knew, who told her that surgery might help restore his sight, but there was no guarantee it would work, and certainly nothing besides the surgery could help at all. Knowing the family couldn’t afford the surgery that might not even work, the doctor and her husband prayed for healing in his eye. They prayed once and nothing happened. They prayed a second time, and still no change. They prayed a third time, and the boy said he felt something in his eye but there was no visible sign of anything. The doctor instructed the family to take their son to the hospital the next morning if his eye still wasn’t better. The next evening, the couple called the family to ask if they had gone to the hospital. “No,” they said. The doctor couldn’t believe it; she had explained to them how his eye needed care quickly. “Why didn’t you go?” she asked. “Because his eye looks normal and he can see out of it again.”
The doctor and her husband were shocked.
They asked to look at it, and sure enough, in the pictures the family sent, the boy’s eye looked perfectly healthy. The family had seen God’s hand in healing their son, and they put their faith in Him. The other day, that boy came to the training centre, and still, his eye is just fine.
The Doctor said it was the first time she had witnessed a miracle.
She had prayed over many people many times, and out of the many God healed this one. Scripture tells us that God will leave the 99 to save the one, and heaven rejoices that the one is saved. The doctor said now she prays in full faith for her patients because she has seen the goodness and power of God.
